The importance of language in the learning process of students has been studied extensively. However, little attention has been paid to the role language plays in the assessment of student writings. Students and instructors at a liberal arts and sciences college were interviewed to reveal their approaches to written assignments. The aim was to…

Reading comprehension is a central skill in secondary education. To be able to provide adaptive instruction, teachers need to be able to accurately estimate students' reading comprehension. However, they tend to experience difficulties doing so. Eye tracking can uncover these reading processes by visualizing what a student looked at, in what…

In the present study, it was hypothesized that the proportion of open questions teachers ask during shared book reading would be directly and indirectly (through class aggregated mean length of utterance) related to children's vocabulary and would be directly and indirectly (through class aggregated mean length of children's utterance and…

Prior studies suggest that teaching reading strategies promotes reading comprehension in adolescents who have difficulties with reading comprehension, yet the results of those studies are mixed. Individual differences in students' vocabulary knowledge may explain these mixed results. This article examines to what extent vocabulary knowledge…

The ability to read in a second language (L2) for academic purposes is essential for higher education students. Dutch colleges increasingly use materials in English or teach in English. This can be challenging for L2 readers, especially students entering higher education from vocational studies, who may have less experience with L2 academic…

Research Findings: In this study, we examined the short- and long-term effects of Reading Express, a home-visiting intervention in which volunteers encourage low socio-economic status and ethnic minority parents to engage in interactive shared reading with their child. Outcomes of a quasi-experiment involving 176 children in the Netherlands (mean…

People read for many different reasons. These goals affect the cognitive processes and strategies they use during reading. Understanding "how" reading goals exert their effects requires investigation of whether and how they affect specific component processes, such as validation. We investigated the effects of reading goal on text-based…

In the Netherlands, the quality of the reading curriculum is currently under debate because of disappointing results on national and international assessments of students' reading skills and motivation. In a mixed-method study, we analyzed the content of Dutch textbooks for reading comprehension instruction (i.e., the implemented curriculum) and…

Low-achieving adolescents are known to have difficulties with reading comprehension. This article discusses whether principles of reciprocal teaching can improve low-achieving adolescents' reading comprehension in whole-classroom settings and to what extent treatment effects are dependent on implementation quality. Over the course of two years,…